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Chapter 16
White House Down? Politics in Disaster
The purpose of this chapter is to offer a concise history of the political messaging
implicit to the disaster film genre, including apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic films. In
keeping with the traditional ideology of popular films generally, the disaster film genre
tends to denigrate group action and extol the importance of strong individual leadership
and bravery. Over time, disaster scenarios shift from their setting in the United States to
more widely conceived annihilating events taking place globally. Government and
military action is often doomed, even in these international scenes and global
backdrops, and individuals must rescue themselves.
Objectives for Chapter 16:
1. Note the increased popularity of disaster films at the start of the 21st century.
2. Outline the traditional descriptions of the disaster film genre and note the current
trend to either engage in self-mockery (The Core) or dark allegory and inter-
textuality (Children of Men, The Road).
3. Look at how key examples offer political allegory and create ideological impressions,
including the patriarchal leadership of The Poseidon Adventure and the
psychosexual dynamics that lead to the restoration of patriarchy in The Birds.
4. Identify, describe, and analyze an early template of the disaster film formula, Five
Came Back, and underscore its political philosophical underpinnings around the
state of nature and the social contract.
5. Describe and analyze the monster trope as disaster film feature in King Kong’s
implicit racist narrative. Note the way the 1970s updates the disaster tale to address
the politics of fossil fuel and foreign oil dependence in King Kong (1976).
6. Explore the political reactions to Lifeboat (1944).
7. Describe and explore the “fantastic displacement” (see Chapter 1) of the 1950s
nuclear age and Red Scare.
8. Explore the meaning and significance of the centrality to 1970s disaster films of the
acting persona of Charlton Heston, the quintessential “last man on earth” and
Republican standard-bearer.
9. Note the creeping influence of apocalyptic and biblical language in the political
rhetoric of the 21st century and the movies that seem also to be informed by such
tendencies, including White House Down and Oblivion.
10. Examine the class politics in Elysium and the hegemonic depiction of global climate
change in films like Day After Tomorrow.
11. Assert that films like White House Down and Olympus Has Fallen transcode the
dysfunctional partisan politics of the day into literal destruction of the Capital
building.
Discussion Questions for Chapter 16:
1. What are the competing definitions of the disaster genre and what relevance do
these conventions have for the political qualities of a film?
2. Why now? Why is there such an uptick in disaster and apocalyptic films in the
2010s? In what way do these films writ large transcode current American political
trends?
3. How do the sci-fi disaster films of the 1950s address or fantastically displace the Red
Scare and the dawning nuclear age?
4. Whose side do you take in the Steinbeck–Hitchcock debate over the meaning and
significance of Lifeboat as political allegory?
5. Children of Men is one of the few disaster films to show the necessity of a plurality
of people endeavoring to save “men”—can you name others? If group action does
not work, what do most films of this kind say will work? How do such films make
clear that collective action is doomed to fail?
Essay Topics for Chapter 16:
1. What other, more current iterations of the politics of race and gender evident in
King Kong (1933) can you find? Locate images and cultural storylines that resonate
with this myth and analyze how they fit the lineage but alter it in light of current
racial circumstances.
2. Analyze White House Down as a racial buddy film: who is the hero and who
provides the comic relief? Is this film simply an update of the paranoid thrillers of
the 1970s and 1990s or do the black president and white war veteran change its
political content in some important way?
3. Analyze the stylization of Contagion and Elysium: how do the sci-fi qualities and
prosthetic technology of Elysium affect its political critique of class divisions,
especially in comparison and in contrast with the relatively more realist aesthetic of
Contagion? Given that both films are extremely current relative to actual current
events and trends, which style of filmmaking has the greater effect in making a
political statement?
